Jared Merves joined me on the Conquer Local podcast to talk branded content, audience buying, and how media companies build 50 percent margin programs that actually scale.
The first time I heard the term branded content I had the same reaction most sellers have. What is it, why does it matter, and how is it different from everything else I already sell? I knew content marketing. I knew native advertising. I even remembered advertorial from the print days. But branded content sat in its own lane and I needed a proper 101 from someone who lived in it every day.
Jared Merves is that person. After 15 years in digital marketing with organizations like Dallas Morning News, Tegna, and Cars.com, he founded Wonder View out of Denver, Colorado, where he helps agencies and brands run programs that actually engage audiences instead of interrupting them. He joined me on the Conquer Local Podcast to give us the real playbook.
What Branded Content Actually Is
Jared’s definition is the cleanest I’ve heard:
“Branded content is defined as any sales or marketing initiative that uses content to engage a user and is paid for by a client.”
Content marketing is the parent bucket, projected to be a $412 billion business. Branded content is the growth slice underneath, sitting between content marketing and paid media. If your client has a great asset but no distribution plan, branded content is the vehicle that solves that problem.
Where It Sits In The Funnel
Jared and I agreed that branded content performs best at awareness and engagement. A reader who clicks into a sponsored article about healthy weeknight meals is literally raising their hand. They just told you they are the target audience. That is the highest intent signal you can get at the top of the funnel.
From there you can move them to consideration or trial, but the primary value lives at the top and middle. Trying to sell branded content as a bottom funnel direct response play is how most agencies get burned.
Why Most Agencies Failed At Native Before
Jared said something I hear all the time in the field. Agencies dabbled in native five or six years ago, threw a client press release onto a publisher site, got no engagement, and the client asked what the value was. No one had a good answer. Native became a dirty word.
The fix is to stop selling content and start selling audiences. As Jared put it:
“At the end of the day, success of a branded content program is connecting your brand or your client with their target audience.”
That means the content is one component of a larger program that also includes:
- Real audience targeting by geography, demo, and category
- Distribution across premium publisher sites via native ad networks
- Performance tracking for impressions, engagement rate, and time on content
- A content strategy built around what the reader actually wants to consume
The Grocery Chain Example That Made It Click
One example stuck with me. For a large grocery chain fighting for share in a crowded market, Wonder View built a healthy living series with weekly recipes, event ideas, and tips for the homemaker. It ran only in the markets the chain served. The client’s ad messages were the only ones alongside the content. Readers came back week over week and started to view the brand as additive instead of interruptive.
Compare that to a banner ad screaming “buy our avocados” and you see why awareness programs need a different approach. A billboard rep cannot give you trackability. A branded content program can.
The Margin Story For Agencies
Here is the part sales leaders will care about. Jared told me they focus on keeping 50 percent or better margin on these programs. That is a number SEM sellers cannot touch. If you control content production costs or handle them in-house, and you buy media smartly through a native DSP, the economics work.
That is a real growth lane for agencies and media companies that want to move beyond product peddling. I talked about that in depth with Jed Williams on proving performance, and it applies here too.
How You Know It Worked
Because this runs like an ad campaign through native ad servers, you get full performance tracking:
- Impressions and placements delivered
- Engagement rate on placements
- Click through to the article page
- Time on content, with a minute plus being a strong win
A reader spending over a minute with a branded article is essentially giving the sponsor a 60 second exclusive ad. That is a very different conversation than the click-and-bounce metrics most display campaigns produce.
Where To Go From Here
If you are selling awareness programs, branded content belongs in your toolkit. Start by auditing a client’s existing assets, identify the audience they actually need to reach, then build a distribution plan that puts that content in front of the right eyes on premium sites. If you do that consistently, you become the rep who does more than push products. You become the one they call first when the next budget is set. For more on that shift, read about what actually converts in a sales pitch.